Landline Apocolypse

 I heard yesterday that they had switched off all landlines here in England.

Now I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what it means. 

I assume 'they' means BT.

We personally haven't had a house phone for about a year. No one phoned us on it, only marketing firms. We rely entirely on our mobiles. 

So anyone know what it means that they switched off all landlines?

HOLD THE PHONE!

Hi Woodsy, I think these qualify as phones. 

have you got any of them readers?

Will O. UK

KEV'S SIXTH DOCTOR WHO CUSTOM SCANNER PROP

All I've got to offer is this. A scratchbuild I made of a scanner used by the sixth Doctor. I made it from a Mettoy walkie talkie toy. Presumably the original was made from one too.

Over and out,

Kevin

UK

WILL'S TOY TELEPHONES

The common Johnny Seven phone set, but the nicer box art.

The Jostar / Cowan de Groot Disney phone set … made in Yugoslavia .

and finally, the clever Mattel-O-Phone (geddit?) where you can talk to your imaginary friends via the records supplied. Could never get it to work properly though!

Will O,

UK

 

Just Dial Y-AB-ADABA-DOO!

Woodsy,

Regarding your post about toy phones: this Flintstones phone, made by Empire, currently resides in my collection.

From The Town of Bedrock
Fr-'Ed' Feuerstein

Vegas Base

Hold the Line

 I had one if these as a kid I reckon. A toy payphone.

We had lodgers at our home in the Sixties. They worked for the GPO or GTO, not sure which. Telephones in Preston. One of them, Ray, got me one of these I'm sure.

Did you have a toy phone?

The End of the Line

Preparing for painters coming to Moonbase I've stripped out some old cables.

I did it with a slight tear in my eye as these were telephone cables to the loft.

Back in 2004 when the attic was made into an Ebay office I installed a landline up there. Rather than get a twin phone set I decided to have as old a phone as I could have from my collection of old telephones.

I opted for a green GPO dial phone on my desk. It was fun seeing it alongside old toys for sale like Masters of the Universe or whatever I had in that day.

To do it I needed cables from the BT point two floors down! So up they went, those cables got tucked under skirting, hidden under carpets, tacked to stairs and walls and eventually ending up in the loft. 

I think I got the phone cables from Wilkos. Great fun installing them.

So it was with sadness that I ripped them all out. I no longer need a landline phone in the loft because I no longer Ebay full time. That ended in 2007. My Power Seller days were over.

Since then the attic has become the traditional family dump for everything needed but unimportant, the exceptions being the Christmas decs and my old toys!

It's always a moment when one technology boots out another. Now it's just a landline downstairs and the ubiquitous all-knowing mobile. Hardly any cables.

I do miss those days in the attic answering toy queries on my dial phone.

Did you have landline phone cables everywhere readers? Did you have an extension phone?

WHO YA PHONING MR. ROBOT?

 

This is new to me, the Melody Tel robot toy from the 80's.

What do you think?

Do telephones and robots go together?

TRIM AND STYLISH: A TOY TRIMPHONE

 Aah, the GPO! Plug me into nostalgia please!

I loved this toy trimphone I saw on an old auction. Its a Moneybox too!

I had many toy phones when I was a youngster and they were great fun. I never had a toy trimphone though, although we did use a trimphone at Moonbase for years.

Here it is in Seventies avocado green among its old stablemates at Moonbase years ago.

Did you have a trimphone or toy phone?

HOLY ROTARIES: THERE'S BAT-PHONES EVERYWHERE!

Grandson Moonbase Junior is just batty about Batman like his batty old Grandad.

He's got two ERTL die-cast batmobiles from 1989 and loves to phone Batman on his McDonalds Batman/Wonderwoman mobile phone communicator.

Thinking ahead I've been wondering whether to get  a proper batphone for him so I can ring him up on it when he's at home.

I always loved the little red batphone in my Corgi Batmobile, based on Adam West's original car, so I was thrilled to see that a version is commercially available! Alas its just a money bank! Drat!

But holy smokes, there's a proper working version of the Commissioner Gordan rotary dial phone actually ready to ship right now from Gotham City! Now how cool is that!

There's even an online shop that stocks loads of these different batphones and they've even sold one to Adam West! How's that for life imitating art!

But to be honest the batphone I still like the most is the stuff released in the Sixties by Marx and Remco. I didn't have one and I'm unsure if they made it to the UK. 

REMCO made a lovely rotary phone like Commissioner Gordon's

 but the one I'd like the most is this clunky red 'Hotline' handset by Marx from 1966! 

What a Gotham beauty!

It looks huge, like an army field phone, but it isn't. Its quite small as I've discovered from pics on the net. Nevertheless it actually talks and it has ten different sayings you can hear!

Moonbase Junior wants to hear that batphone talk!

Which Batphone would you choose readers?

PUT ME THROUGH TO THE TOY DEPARTMENT!

This toy caught my eye on the 'Bay so I saved the pic.

From 1972 by Tech Toys of Cincinnati and made in HK its a telegraph key toy.

Its what I'd call a telephone exchange I think. I'd have loved this as a kid. I can see a battery included too so there's current passing through to create the buzzing.

Did you have anything like this as a kid?

Who would you be put through to?

KEV'S PYE POCKET PHONE

Hi,

Here is my Pye Pocketphone. It is the same model used by CI5 operatives in The Professionals and by Steed, Purdey and Gambit in The New Avengers.

Mine seems to still work but nobody is calling from the 70's.

Take care,

Kevin D

UK

I KNOW, LETS TAKE A TELEPHONE WHEREVER WE GO!

I have one of the earliest mobile phones going I reckon.

Not so much a phone. More a brief case full of a huge battery and a phone nestled at the side.

I bought it in 2000 when Ebay landed in the UK. The phone was cheapish but the shipping from the US nearly sank Woodsy Inc.

From the 1970's my attache case telephone must be the forerunner of what we now call mobiles. It even says Portable Telephone on its baseplate. 

There are about 15 big buttons to push down and I've often pressed them and wondered what they did and who they would have connected too. I'd love to fire it up! I'd probably need permission!

Costing thousands of dollars at the time - it came with all its paperwork -  there can't have been that many of these things around in the US in the late 70's surely? or?

I will blog the phone in detail soon but wondered if you had a briefcase telephone or a an attache case walkie talkie, either a real one or a toy?

Maybe an early mobile brick, a field phone or a toy Batphone or a James Bond communicator in an attache case? I had a Secret Sam case but I'm sure there wasn't a walkie talkie or even a radio in there but maybe it was just a secret!

Let's hear from you!

ANOTHER UGLY SPACE TOY: THE LA PAZ RAY SPACE TELEPHONE SHIP!

Space and ugly toys just goes together the world over for some reason.

Here's another dog's dinner of design.

The Nave Espacial range by La Paz of Alicante, Spain.

Its hard to tell what has influenced these toys. And when in doubt just slap a big plastic telephone on top!

Who ya gonna call?

The tip?

Anyways, there are 3 toys in this old range: 

This is the Orbitor

The Pioner

[with a very neat radar dish I must admit!]

and Rescue.

What do you think readers?

men in black's ericofon

I caught Men in Black again on the box last night.

Twenty years old this year!

As with all iconic films there's always something I didn't notice before.

This time it was on the MiB office floor - all the staff have Swedish Ericsson upright phones on the desks, the ivory 'Ericofon'!

Now I love the Ericsson upright and had one for years. Its fabulous shape and hidden dial make for a real phone experience. Very UFO!

I can completely see why MiB had Ericcsons but it's odd that this, the ivory 'Ericofon' should be used as prop rather than say something from the 1990's. The Ericofon first appeared in 1954 after all!

So is it simply that no other landline since 1954 has been given such space-age looks that the MiB prop people went straight for the Ericsson? Is this retro-fitting? retro-proofing? product placement?

I had another question in mind about the availability of Ericofons in 1997. How did MiB have so many? But when I read websites like this http://www.britishtelephones.com/tsr1007.htm its obvious that they were around in quantity at least in 1980 in the UK.

Was this the case in the States and elsewhere?

THE PORTABLE TELEPHONE ATTACHE CASE CIRCA 1979

Having always had an interest in spies, attache and briefcases, I couldn't resist buying this on Ebay. It popped up around 2005, was very reasonably won and it came all the way from the USA.

Its a Bell American VOX XXI Portable Telephone circa 1979, part of the origin of today's tiny mobile phones!

There's a dial handset and whole console of big buttons, none of which I can fathom! The blue metal cover is atop a huge battery, which takes up most of the case and weighs an absolute ton! Needless to say its flat and I have no way of charging it.

It came with dealer correspondence and information.

The letter dated 1979 explains that such a telephone would cost around $4,000 all in! God knows how much that would be now! It was clearly a rich kids' toy this!

The letter hails from General Electric in Ferndale, Michigan, USA.

A 1983 spec sheet was in there too!

The base of the case has four feet, two maker's plates and a plug socket.

The socket, close up above, has 10 pins. is this for power or something else? there is a jack plug socket next too it. As to what for I'm unsure.

I'd love to charge it up and make a call! ha ha.

It's the closest I've ever come to one of those iconic cases from 2001 A Space Odyssey containing a complete office like the one below, complete with television! Anyone got one of those beasts?

WOODSY'S PHONES

Continuing the 'phone conversation', here's a table of telling bones, which I've collected over the years. The most expensive by far was the upright cream Erikson which I bought in a beautiful vintage shop in Whitby called Stonehouse. 

The rest of the phones were from local car boot sales. They all worked except the American cream push button Bell, probably my favourite phone of the batch. I adored the way they were carried round for miles around kitchens and dens in US TV shows!

The black and grey flatbed phone was issued by Swatch no less. The radio-phone at the front was a hangover from the 1990's and inspired by that icon of the Seventies bed-side, the Goblin Teasmaid I should think. I wonder if you could use the phone as a clock alarm?

Alas, many have these have now left Moonbase for pastures new but all were cared for whilst resting here.

PAUL V'S PHONES

Woodsy's memories and the comments by Tony and Kevin awakened a few memories of my own (thanks for that!).

Earliest memories of a phone are from when I was six. I can still remember our phone number from then, which I actually use as a password for certain things (as did my late Mum, I once happened to notice :)

I can recall also using the trick of clicking the button the receiver rested on, which was also reputed to make the exchange think you'd interrupted the call so you'd be calling for free :) though I've never known if that was actually the case (perhaps Tony would know that?). Prank calls were also a favourite pastime.

My dad being a collector of 78rpm Blues records (pretty well-known in his time) meant that we'd also get calls late in the evening, with an American voice asking for "Mex Vree-dee" (not how you pronounce it :) so some of the first words in my English vocabulary were "I will get him for you."

Trimphones I came across as a student in London's East End in the early Eighties, in fact there was a classmate who could do a perfect imitation of the "ffrrrrp-ffrrrrp" sound it made to the confusion of whoever picked up the real one in the studio.

I fondly remember using British pay phone boxes quite a lot in those days as well, which also had a distinct smell which I can't really describe. A real shame most of those red street icons were taken away. (Once had the idea of buying one and converting it into a shower stall, but on second thoughts it would probably be too small... not to mention getting the thing into the bathroom!)

I too have a couple of old phones knocking around. The oldest is a simple wooden box with a funnel on top to speak into, separate earpiece on a lead (currently missing), and a push-button on the side to call the exchange with, no dial.

This may have been an in-house phone to call to the kitchen perhaps, but for all I know it could've been used in a very early public network. In my first flat in Brussels (where we also survived without a phone) I had it hanging on the wall in the kitchen; anybody wanting to use our phone would be told about its existence before being directed to the bar across the road which had a payphone!

Next oldest is a British bakelite set very similar to what Tony is showing (little drawer underneath and all). I had hopes of still using it, but the Brussels exchanges going digital prevented that.

Much more recent is a Swatch cordless phone, an excellent rap-rod which has sadly given up the ghost but which I intend to try and get fixed. The benefit of the bright orange colour was that it made it much more findable every time Mrs V left it lying around somewhere!

To round off I include my old iPhone, the first and only mobile I've ever had. Although I'll readily admit that mobile phones are very useful, I'm not that fond of what they lead to. F ex certain people blithely bothering you whenever it suits them (or being annoyed that they couldn't when you don't answer), people in cars using them, or the interruptions during social occasions where apparently the call or text message is more important than the live person one is talking with. 

Plus mobile phones had nasty little buttons in a generally most unattractive package, before the iPhone came along with its clean interface in a clean housing design. A friend brought one over from Florida (before they were available over here) and gave me first right of refusal, a colleague could jailbreak it and that did it for me. 

So it's the original first model, still running a by now obsolete system, but still doing sterling service. To protect it I've added padding to a 1942 US Army first aid kit pouch; the notice on the start screen is a sign from a WW2 destroyer at Chatham Dockyard which somehow looked appropriate. :)

Paul Vreede

TONY'S PHONES

Hi Woodsy,  All of my adult life I've had an odd passion for collecting a few things from bygone times, including telephones.  I've attached pix of a couple of old phones and rusty telephone signs which I've been fortunate enough to find and enjoy over the years. You're welcome you use them to illustrate your article if you wish. 

My fave is the vintage black bakelite, with the amber light near the handset.  At some point in the past this phone was customised and used as a  'backstage' theatre phone. It's dated 1943.  I've never wanted to clean it. I  prefer instead to leave it covered in its original theatre dust and greasepaint.  To remove its history would just be wrong. Ah, if only it could talk... what tales it would tell of life during the war years!

Best Wishes, Tony K